Project description

The following project has an ecologist and protest point of view among the uses and bad uses of water. Its apparently simple approach hides a major problem as well as deep symbolic meanings.

Short Description:

The work consists of a black screen on which will appear small videos in mosaic, distributed around another black square. All these videos show toilets at the time in which they are draining. As these videos are appearing in greater number and the sound also begins to generate a loud noise, the black square in the centre starts to light and an image of one of the many fountains in the city of Madrid appears.

Visitors will be asked to collaborate with the project by sending videos of their own bathrooms to a given e-mail in order to be incorporated into the map, which will update every day.

Conceptual Approach:

The work reflects on the use of water that that a city with 3 million inhabitants does. A million toilets are simply too many toilets. The water stream per second that this requires, assuming that each household only pulls the string 10 times a day, is immense, goes beyond our imagination, we simply cannot recreate in our minds such quantity. The book aims to take this to light and generate, through a mosaic of videos and overlapping sound of successive evacuating toilets, that feeling which escapes our notice. The reason is that we do not see the water when it goes down the drain, or our neighbours’ or, indeed, we cannot even see the water before using it. It is always hidden and we are barely aware of its existence and source. If we had X-ray eyes and the ears of a lynx, we could realize the situation without the need to create such a work, a work that hits us with such a collision of images and sound, with the purpose of overwhelming us.

On the other hand, the relationship between the shown toilets and the fountain that appears when every toilet flushes is a reference to Duchamp's Fountain, which, precisely because he inverted it, the fluid that we throw will be returned to us.